Many computing devices, including mobile computing devices such as smart phones, tablet computers, and the like, are capable of accessing data over a network. Video streaming over the Internet, for instance, is one of the most widely used data services. When streaming a video, a computing device constantly receives and displays video data delivered by a provider. The provider may store the video data at some remote location (e.g., a server) in a series of file segments, where each file segment contains a different portion of the video data. The provider may deliver these file segments individually to the computing device over the network. The computing device may download and store these file segments temporarily (e.g., at least long enough to play back the data) in a buffer.
The volume of network traffic generated by streaming video services often consumes more network bandwidth than any other application.